16

AS EMMA and Thomas Sweringen grew older they found it harder to keep their eye on things; harder to get on and off a horse. When they walked it seemed the hills were steeper and even the stairs. Emma had grown even heavier, couldn't refuse sugars and fats and starches; as one of a generation who took it for granted that most women grow stout, it didn't matter, but it did matter that it was harder to keep an eye on things, so the time came when she hired first one and then another foreman to take charge — not completely — but, well, you know.

There were even certain small advantages to being semi-retired. Call it that. Now she could regularly attend Eastern Star meetings in Salmon, should she wish; she had time for books that had gone unread for a long, long time. Each year, as she grew older, she slipped yet another year into the past, into the time of her children's youth, then into her own youth when she saw Thomas at those dances and had despaired of ever having him.

Why, back then she had even done a little fancy work because she thought a young woman ought to, but her hands were no longer up to that, nor her eyes, which had begun to trouble. It was a different world, then. Of course it was, because everything was all ahead. The trees around the house had grown tall, tall, and cast so much more shade.

And Thomas? Well, Thomas. He had time for his Masonic meetings now, but didn't do much about them. So many he knew were gone. And he didn't like to miss the news on the Atwater Kent but the news was so often bad he turned it off and then turned it on because maybe the news had got better. Why, only yesterday he hadn't given Europe a thought. And he had time for the seven clocks upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber; he tensed up as the hour approached and they were about to strike, and she found she had begun tensing up, too, because it meant so much to him that they all struck at the same time. What was he looking for — perfection? And wasn't it funny that it used to be she who looked for perfection. Striking clocks! Curious that when we age it is the small things and not the big things that matter.

Let the young people take care of the big things.

“Oh Thomas, for the Lord's sake! It doesn't matter if they don't strike all at once.”

He'd begin his tinkering with them.

The years had taught her that nothing, nothing, nothing can be perfect; the years had taught him that maybe if you tinker, tinker, tinker…

He had taken to himself the homely task of gathering the eggs each evening just before supper; there was a game about it because so many of the hens were as wild as pheasants and hid their nests. Thomas liked to have the grandchildren and then the great-grandchildren with him because then it was like hunting Easter eggs. He gave whichever child found the most eggs a two-bit piece. Later on he gave the same to the ones who hadn't found so many, to make up. That was no way to teach children the reward of success, but that's what he did.

He put the drops in her eyes; he was the only one who did it right. She couldn't sit quietly enough for the others. They might hit her eye with the thing and Thomas had the steadiest hands in the family.

Of course there was no question of being lonely in the big house; the girls were back and forth with their husbands and children, all the birthdays and holidays and more every year. There wasn't a month now when somebody hadn't been born. And the cook would come up from the cookhouse with her tales of what she thought was going on in the bunkhouse, and visitors and old friends, and of course Maude.

Maude. When the dust settles, it seems to be one child who ends up at home.

Maude was between Roberta and Pauline. She had married a man too quickly named Dunn whose father was a circuit judge who sat twice a year at the courthouse in Salmon. That's where Maude met young Dunn. Judge and Mrs. Dunn were decent people but it turned out as it often does that young Dunn was a different kettle of fish, maybe because they gave him too much, as parents will to an only child. Young Dunn drove up and down the valley in a Mercer Raceabout and jumped ditches with it. It is likely that Maude was as much drawn to the scarlet Mercer as to Dunn. The car would have been a better bargain. After Maude married Dunn they lived for awhile in California where people have no roots and believe in every crazy thing. Maude sent oranges the first year. Then they were divorced down there without a word about it, and Maude came back to the ranch with the little girl. She had had to ask them to send money. That is hard for a young woman who thinks she has burned her bridges.

Then Maude had a few beaux up and down the valley, but most of them didn't have much gumption and of course she had the little girl.

Maude was almost as stylish as Beth; she could take any old thing and look good in it, so she decided to take a position with the department store in Portland, Oregon. She got it through some people. She began by selling hats; they promised her that later she could be a buyer, but most of her salary went for the woman who took care of the little girl and in the end it didn't work out. You might have thought she might meet a young man, say in the lobby of the Benson Hotel, but young men are already married.

She had had to send for money again.

You couldn't help feel sorry for Maude when she came back to the ranch. When you think you have put something behind you and you haven't, it looks different, or maybe you are different. She was cheerful most of the time, but Maude was one of these up-and-down people. When she looked at the trees grown so tall beside the house, or knelt before the fireplace to kindle a fire as the afternoons shortened and grew cold, she might think, “These are the things the other girls left, and these are the things I didn't want to return to.”

When the cooks down at the cookhouse quit or were fired because they began to drink or grow trashy or cause trouble among the men, Maude filled in and, like Beth earlier, she cooked up at the shearing sheds and was on hand to see to the big dinners on birthdays and holidays. Visitors often spoke of how attractive the living room was.

That was Maude for you.

Believe you me, a foreman had his hands full and was worth his hire. He saw that things went as they should, that in the spring four hundred calves were branded with hot irons with the letter S and ten thousand sheep with the same letter but with red paint instead of irons. A foreman must know obstetrics because in the spring when lambs and calves came, sometimes they came wrong end to from the womb, and got stuck. A foreman saw that the bull calves had their testicles removed with a sharp pocketknife and the human hand, and then they were steers. And then the ram lambs had their testicles removed with a sharp pocketknife and the help of human teeth, and then they were wethers, and a little later you ate them as spring lamb with peas and mint jelly.

And then all that machinery that made ranches look like a used-car lot: sulky rakes and buck rakes and mowing machines — Deerings, McCormicks, John Deere — beaverslide derricks. The sheep wagons resembled prairie schooners, each fitted with a bunk and shelves with doors to keep the food and dishes from falling out when the horses started up, and its own stove, and very comfortable it was for herders even in wild, cold weather. And of course the old red threshing machine.

A foreman hired good men and fired the men who weren't; he gave orders in a way that made men want to work for him, men who didn't quit and kite off to Salmon and get drunk. He was in charge of putting up the hay — five thousand acres of hayland to be mowed and raked and stacked, two thousand tons.

Then there was the shearing of the sheep in June, and dipping them for ticks. Ticks are about the ugliest insects you ever saw! There was vaccinating the calves against blackleg in the spring and dehorning them in the fall, the blood spurting out from where the horn was cut off with a tool like pruning shears, and then it would be winter — oh, that first day of snow, sheets of it sweeping down from Gunsight Peak. Then the feeding of the hay, and the blizzards, the wonder that winter would ever end, and the spring come. But come it did, it always did, and the trees grew taller.

One foreman and then another to see that the camptenders with their packhorses supplied the sheepherders in the hills with the exact things they wanted, the Bull Durham instead of the Duke's Mixture, the canned raspberries and not the canned peaches, not this time. Flour, spuds, sugar, eggs, butter, canned milk, canned peas and canned tomatoes, slabs of bacon and hams that Thomas cured himself, or used to — and made the lard too, he did. Yes, all those pigs. It often seemed that the herders up in the mountains ate better than they did down there on the ranch, but herders could afford to be picky, and they were. Good herders were hard to find, the job was a huge responsibility — eighteen hundred head of sheep to a herder. You couldn't really blame them, that after staying up there in those hills all summer with nobody to talk to but themselves and a collie dog, why, you couldn't blame them if they hiked off to Salmon after they'd brought their sheep safely down in the fall, hiked down there and drank and did what some men will until their money was gone and they crept back sick and penitent.

Sometimes she wondered how she and Thomas had done it. She knew how she did it. She knew why she did it. For Tom-Dick.

Yes, a foreman would stay a year or so and then he'd get to thinking about responsibility, why it was they who had the ranch and he the responsibility. Why it wasn't his grandfather who had discovered the gold that bought the land. Sooner or later he'd quit or have to be fired — no matter what people said, she'd never liked firing people — because he no longer attended to business or the hired men didn't like him. He saw himself getting old and ending up in the Cabbage Patch down at the end of Salmon.

A foreman had his own house on the place and his own outhouse to set him apart from the hired men, and to give him a sense of self, and it would have been all right if he had married, except that it never works out when somebody who works on a ranch gets married, somehow. As for the hired men and herders, there'd be no room for their women, no place for a wife, and that's why there were nine disorderly houses in Salmon.

John Weston was the last and best foreman she ever had. He was a Mormon, or his folks were, and he had had to work very hard as a child. You saw that in his face; something of the little boy who had worked so hard was in that narrow face. He worked so hard he sometimes went to sleep after supper in his chair. His father had a ranch in the southern part of the state, but he was the youngest son and there wasn't room for him so he struck out. Work, work, work. He didn't run off to town. He didn't drink. Sometimes you'd catch him flipping through the Saturday Evening Post, just flipping, looking at the pictures apparently, but never, never, not even when she herself and Thomas were in charge, was the hay so fine, the lambs so fat or the wool so heavy.

You see, an arrangement had to be made, and at once; it was awful to think, to walk through that big old sandstone house thinking that sooner or later John Weston would step into the dining room where she made out checks, and ask for his time.

So he was included in the next round of holidays, and although he may have found it somewhat awkward at first, he relaxed, and in the spirit of the thing he had a drink or two with Thomas. Then Nora handed him her guitar. Ah-ha! It turned out he knew many old cowboy songs. Shortly after, he moved into the Big House where only the family had breakfast, and before long, Maude married him.

You might wonder at all that fuss and concern all those years about a good foreman. You might wonder, Where all this time was Tom-Dick? Mama's darling, who said, “Hello, Mama…”

But Tom-Dick died many, many years ago. His room upstairs was just the same as it had been the winter morning he left it, and all his little things just the same.

As foreman, John Weston rose at one or two in the morning during lambing season and went on down to the sheds. He saved many lambs. He knew little, understood little but work and bolted his food to get back to it. The backs of his hands were raw and chapped. His nails were sometimes bitten to the quick. His palms were thick with callus, and perhaps the lines on them told the same story as the many little scars.

One morning he stood gulping a cup of coffee, before reaching for his hat. He paused, stared out the window, and dropped dead.

The Sheep Queen was dead by then, and Thomas.

The ranch was sold and everybody got a couple of hundred thousand dollars apiece after taxes. It wasn't much in exchange for parting with one's heart, for all the Christmases, the view of Gunsight Peak and the music of the water falling over the stones down Sweringen Creek.

It was painful to drive along the new highway that ran along the right-of-way where the old G&P had run, to see the sandstone ranch house and the big white barn, the property of strangers. You have to work harder at being a family when the land is gone. And you have to write letters.

Maude moved down to Salmon where she would be close to Polly and Roberta and they could talk about how it was.

Here is a letter from Maude.

Dear Tom:

I'm not sure of the date because last Christmas the bank forgot to send me a calendar, but it's May something towards the end.

I guess Roberta was pretty upset when she heard about the Nofzinger woman, but she gets upset and then she gets over it after she's upset everybody else. When I get upset I stay that way, so I try not to. I worry about her because she does too much for her kids. One of these days she might have to pull in her horns, but maybe De Witt left her more than I think or maybe his family was one of those families that seem to have money even when they don't. Of course she and Beth were so close that the very idea that some stranger should think she knew something about Beth, and she didn't would drive her wild.

Mary Margaret is working for the sheriff just outside Los Angeles and likes it a lot. I don't know just what she does. I guess a mother should know. Maybe one of those jobs it's not worth explaining. She always says you're her favorite cousin. Paul never fitted in with the family, and his people were some kind of Russians. Foreigners always look sort of deaf to me.

Mary Margaret has a little waterfall in her house. I've always hated the sound of water dripping and we were better off at the ranch before we got water in.

We took the jeep to Cougar Point for the first real picnic of the year. Polly made her potato salad again. I read somewhere the other day, probably in Reader's Digest because it's the only thing I've got the patience to read, that sometimes whole families are wiped out with potato salad if it sits. Wouldn't that be awful for us, but Polly's never sits. Frankie did most of the driving because I am almost seventy, and I think sometimes I don't look a day younger. Ha-ha! It's nice to have grandchildren. He wants to go to Europe so I guess I'll let him. When you're young you like to go places. Adele and Cathy plan to be up from California as soon as school closes and I'm bracing myself because of all the boys hanging around, but I guess that's what a grandmother is for. I asked for it!

They're trying to stop the gambling here in Salmon again — state people or federal — but it doesn't seem to work. I don't see why people should try to stop things people are going to do anyway. All you have to do is go to Nevada. I felt bad when they got rid of the slot machines. I could hardly wait to get downtown and lose money.

Salmon is a lot bigger. The state and the Chamber of Commerce sends out these flyers about the good hunting and fishing and how friendly everybody is, and the people come from all over and some of them settle here, retired people who want to see the mountains before they die. Good enough reason. Two new motels and a swimming pool in one. I don't think much of swimming pools. So now the bridge across the river in Salmon is too narrow with all the cars. Years ago they phoned down from Challis that some tourists had fallen in the river and drowned and at the rate they were floating they were supposed to show up at the bridge in Salmon around three in the afternoon, and everybody in town was on the bridge hoping to be the first to spot them. Some people brought lunches. The bodies never did show up.

Went out the other day to the rest home by the hot springs to see Aunt Nora. Sometimes she's a little vague, but Tom she's over a hundred years old. She dresses well for her age, earrings and everything. I wonder why we all get so old, except your mother.

Would have been nice in a way if the woman turned out to be your sister, so many of us have died off we could always use another one. If we had somebody out there in Seattle we could all go there and a lot cheaper than motels. More fun, too.

But the trouble is, if she had been your sister, all those years Beth would have wondered and grieved. I know she would have, and that's not a good thing to think about…

My mother the woman in the corridor? No.

But something in the tone of my aunt Maude's letter, her harping on change and the past, maybe that brief reference to my mother's grief, moved me to write to Amy and to send her my father's address. Was it my aunt's reference to a possible descent on Seattle? For in her loneliness, that is precisely what Amy would have wanted. What was the point of my aunt's letter?

I scarcely knew how or what to feel about Amy. She was a ghost but not a ghost. My half sister, Belle, was not a ghost. I had grown up with her, but that wasn't the point. She wasn't a ghost because she was my mother's daughter. It didn't matter who the father was. If my daughter had a child, I wouldn't give a damn who the father was, because I would be its grandfather and my mother its great-grandmother, and the Sheep Queen its great-great-grandmother and so on.

It was a crazy thing — it all seemed to center around whether one was married or not, and what was marriage but a document and a ceremony? Written words, spoken words, the first subject to fire, rot or theft and the second no sooner uttered than vanished. It appears that an exalted idea of marriage can be quite as destructive as divorce, even more so. For without marriage there can be no divorce, and without marriage there can be no adultery.

Why should a little child suffer because its parents weren't married? Given away and forever after clothed in the rags and tatters of illegitimacy that no adoptive parent, however kind and understanding, can mend or cleanse. Small wonder the young people are taking a second look at marriage.

I wondered if I owed Amy love. Can you love one you have never seen? I had often wondered at the injunction that a Christian or a Jew must “love” God. An abstraction sits in the mind — well, it sits in the mind remote from every single one of the five senses. But Amy had substance, such substance that at least two nouns clung to her like burrs: self-doubt and loneliness — the first because she couldn't answer the question, Who am I? and the second because she had no family, and having no family at least doubles the ordinary human fear of death.

One who has a family has the strength to be an example of detachment or courage even in dying; if you leave a family, you do not really die. You crop up in conversations at the breakfast table. Your name is offered as proof. You appear at picnics because the lunch in the basket and the contents of the thermos bottle are the foods you ate and the liquid you drank. You chose the sites because the cold spring wind couldn't find you there, and the pretty shells were in greater variety for the children. The stick you carried when you walked in the woods or to the garage stands ready for son or grandson — see! it is polished by your sweat and the skin of your palm. They remembered how you laughed. What was weak in you, or selfish, is often forgotten. Time has burned the dross out of you.

But without a family you are gone. Done. You never were. The last hours of a derelict lying abandoned in a room in some cheap hotel can't be lonelier.

There is no one to want your picture.

Amy knew what blood was, what a family meant. A family is the group that has to take you in. But damn it, she had no right, for her own peace of mind, to think my mother was her mother. Let her search for the woman in the corridor. God grant that something good had happened to her.

I began to wonder if Amy had tried to call me. If she had had an extra drink, as people do, and tried to call. Maybe it was a good thing my telephone was unlisted.

But I was not yet ready to hear her voice, the intake of her breath across three thousand miles or so. I didn't want to hear her silence, for even her silence would lend her an added dimension and somehow increase my responsibility. It was quite enough to have those pictures, especially the smiling one taken on the day of her marriage that failed. Especially the snapshot of a little girl seven years old in those God-damned boots.

One day, though, we would meet.